When the girl right next door is a celebrity
Gail Harvey — photographer, producer, director — shows us her home in the Beach
Gail Harvey is the girl-next-door. Literally. She is my next-door neighbour.
She is also a director, photographer, producer and sometime-writer with the hotshot movie coming out, Never Saw It Coming, based on the Linwood Barclay thriller and starring Emily Hampshire, Eric Roberts, Maria del Mar and Diane D’Aquila.
A renowned film-and-TV set photographer, the native Torontonian has shot everyone from Liz Taylor to a preternaturally cranky Robert Mitchum, who gave her the finger as she snapped.
Her television-directorial credits include Dark Matter, Murdoch Mysteries and Heartland. She just wrapped a stint in North Bay directing upcoming TV drama series Carter for Sony-TV.
This quintessential over-achiever lives in a three-storey duplex in the Beach. She has French accents throughout, including an Eiffel Tower over her couch, a Parisian placenames poster in her dining area, a black-and-white Parisian street scene shot by Harvey and a pair of prints by legendary Henri CartierBresson, considered the pioneer of street photography.
“I lived in Paris off and on again years ago,” Harvey says. “It was pour l’amour; I was dating a Frenchman. I miss Paris.”
Harvey bought her Beach property in1983. Built in1920, it includes1,800 square feet on two levels, plus a 600square-foot loft on the third floor that functions as her sleeping/sitting-room quarters. The first floor is a loft; the second floor has two bedrooms, an open-style kitchen, a dining area and a living room. There are decks off the second and third floors, and a veranda leading from the first with a view of Lake Ontario.
It was a rental-income property until her kids arrived 20-something years ago: actor/writer daughter Katie Boland and emerging hip-hop artist Michael Boland. Katie appeared in the TIFF film Cardinals and has four movies coming out this year including a role in mom’s thriller. Michael is releasing an album titled Shades.
“I rented out the downstairs so I could be an artist,” Harvey explains. Oh yes, Harvey is also an artist. Her work is on display, as well as some by her nephew Eric Huhta — including a portrait of Michael.
In the bathroom hangs a black-andwhite self-portrait of Harvey standing in the bathtub, heavily pregnant with her first-born, Katie.
Posters from Harvey’s films line the staircase wall including the Rickie Lee Jones biopic The Other Side of Desire and the drama Looking Is the Original Sin. A moody portrait of Martin Sheen hangs on a wall in a living room nook, over a keyboard.
Harvey’s tastes are as dramatic offscreen. The ghost chairs in the dining area come via the supernatural-drama series Lost Girl. “I found them in a store on Kipling Ave. The driver brought them home for me,” she says.
The bold-print chair in the living room comes from Jane Hall, an interior designer with a boho bent. The arresting rug is from Kendall & Co, interior design and decor on Parliament St. The provenance of the show-stopping white armoire in the living room is also Jane Hall.
Harvey quirkily keeps timepieces that don’t keep time: like the antique clock on the living-room window sill. “It was my Dad’s — I don’t turn it on, I like the way it looks,” Harvey demurs. “People say this place looks like New York. It is just stuff I like and I collected.”
Harvey attended Centennial College and Glendon College at York University to study French and went to OCAD University and the Toronto School of Art.
“I always wanted a camera. My first real one was a Pentax; I took it with me at age 20 when I went to Europe with a boyfriend. I turned 21 in Turkey. I applied to Wardair from Europe because I wanted to continue travelling.”
She got the Wardair stewardess gig and on her travels took photos and met photographers.
“I started to freelance for all the newspapers. I was the third woman hired by United Press International on staff as photo journalist,” she says of a photography career that included covering Terry Fox running his Marathon of Hope.
Harvey’s set-photography career started in 1981 with a four-day job on an HBO project paying $350 a day. Ka-ching!
In 1987, she wrote and directed the short film Uphill in a Wheelchair about Wayne Pronger, a composer with cerebral palsy, which became her entrée into the Canadian Film Centre, TIFF and filmmaking. Her feature-film directorial debut was The Shower in 1992. “I never stopped taking pictures,” she stresses.
Indeed. Harvey takes killer portraits. Ask Robert Mitchum.